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Fable Heroes Review

Fable Heroes is a game that came about during a creative day at Lionhead Studios. A group of friends within the company talked it over, and decided they wanted to mash together the four player co-op of games like Gauntlet and Castle Crashers with the Fable universe. This thought process brought us Fable Heroes and it is the first of two Fable universe games will be seeing this year.

Pros:

Friend or Foe: Fable Heroes is a game that was made with four players in mind. Even if you don’t have four human players, there will still be four characters on screen via AI controlled characters. The game is all about playing co-operatively to battle enemies and finish levels with high scores. While co-op is a great thing for any game, as humans we also love to compete with one another. While playing through the levels of the game, enemies will drop gold and hearts. At the end of the levels your gold is totaled up and the person with the most gold wins the level and gets more dice rolls on the abilities board. Taking all of this into account will you treat those you are playing with as friends or will you try and outscore them as if they were your foes?

Atmosphere: The atmosphere of the game is magnificent, it will take you to all the places you love from the Fable universe, and show them off in a whole new light. You will visit fan favorites such as the Millfields, Bowerstone, and Auora, and you will also visit dark versions of all of these places. Spread out through these levels are good and evil chests which contain both power ups and debuffs that will end up on a random player in the party. While you are adventuring through your favorite places you will also battle your favorite enemies. Fable classics like hollowmen, balverines, and hobbes will be returning, with some new enemies like the jack o lanterns making an appearance. While battling these enemies and adventuring though these places you will take on the role of different heroes from the series such as, Hammer, Garth, and Reaver. As you progress through the game you can unlock other characters from the Fable Universe. All of these things coming back really pulls you into the game and you can really tell they wanted this to be an ode to the universe their studio has created.

Avatar Awards: Like the other Arcade NEXT titles and the Fable games before it, Fable Heroes has avatar awards included in the game. You can unlock a Fable Heroes t-shirt by completing the Millfields level and a Jack of Blades mask by leveling up his puppet all the way.

Ghost Mode: Another interesting feature that fits within the friend or foe concept is ghosting. When you die in Fable Heroes, instead of sitting there and have to watch your friends continue on, you have the ability to play as a ghost. While playing as a ghost you can still fight alongside your friends, but you won’t be able to collect gold until you pick up a heart and come back to life. True friends will let you collect a heart and get to acquiring gold, but those evil friends might grab the hearts themselves so that you stay a ghost and they can horde the gold.

Game board & Minigames: One small touch that I really enjoyed is that the level select and abilities boards look like classic game boards you played with friends growing up. Another feature I really enjoyed was the mini games; it is because when we weren’t playing board games as kids, we would play Mario Party. The different mini games included in Fable Heroes, such as mine kart racing and chicken kicker brought back those nostalgic memories from Mario Party.

Cons:

The puppets are a little creepy looking.

Camera: While the side scrolling camera is fine, there was some times where we ran into problems with it. There were times when we were spread over a large area and one of us would get stuck and the others would have to backtrack to be able to continue on. The only way I can think to keep this from happening is if a member of the team gets so far behind it could teleport them to where everyone else is.

In Conclusion:

Lionhead Studios has done a great job in making a game that is fun to pick up and play with friends sitting next to you on the couch. They took a world that many people love and made it so we could enjoy it with more friends that may not enjoy the normal Fable series. There is plenty of replay value to unlock more characters and get better times on levels. I hope that the game gets more DLC in the way of levels and possibly characters. I recommend that you check out the game and get immersed in this new world they have created.